Paul Lindner

Love this definition from the original paper:

... any program is a model of a model within a theory of a model of an abstraction of some portion of the world or of some universe of discourse.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lehman%27s_laws_of_software_evolution

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CW: health issues

It's 2:30am 4:00am and I've just spent an hour talking and consoling my wife through a manic episode caused by brain metastasis. I sit down, exhausted and peer through the rain spattered window. I see the homeless encampment in Mosswood park with dozens of ramshackle tents.

It is with gratitude that I have the benefits as a Googler to spend time caregiving through four recent hospitalizations in the last month.

I still feel the guilt of being so less productive at work. I still feel sad that those below likely won't get the same level of care.

Care for and support those close to you and everywhere around you.

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Used up my FSA and hit my out-of-pocket max on the same day.

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Not sure where to file feedback about things, but my Pixel 2XL screen started to fail so got a Pixel 3 XL (want to keep fingerprint sensor, plus way discounted and pink!)

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Location Kaiser Oakland

Caption: Large white great Pyrenees with a hospital bed in the background.

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https://modelcards.withgoogle.com/about

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A reminder that the thing with two arrows is TAB.

Oh and this is an EKG, so yeah, nothing life-or-death about confusing software.

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Looking for a break? Want to improve fairness for Google products? Have a supportive manager? Then check out this short-term opportunity on the John Henry Team:

https://grow.googleplex.com/opportunity/job/2000000070880

So what exactly would you be doing you might ask...

- Work with a system that pulls all the term lists used for blocking through Google and properly categorize them based on identity facets.
- Work with research/product partners to apply this merged, vetted Societal Context dataset. Help remove bias from underlying systems and ML algorithms
- Build tools that will help us develop System Dynamics as a common practice in policy making and the product design process.
- Have fun!

Our environment is Java+Spanner with a goal of migrating to GraphStore in 2020.

Happy to chat about this opportunity or the project as a whole.

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There's a JFK quote that goes like this:

Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.

Now substitute internal dissent above and think about the changes that have happened in the past year. Paradoxically increasing the domination of communication channels doesn't remove the dissent, it only displaces it into channels where it is much harder to control.

This follows https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variety_(cybernetics)#Law_of_requisite_variety which states that a stable control mechanism contains as many states as the system being controlled. Recent moves like removing live questions, less TGIFs reduces the variety of the control system. Sadly it appears that to make that work we are reducing variety of the system being controlled by pushing out "troublemakers".

My suggestion? Embrace dissent. Make peaceful revolution possible. Recognize and absorb that variety instead of shunting it aside.

A really simple way is having a strong Ombudsman or employee representative. This provides a mechanism to peacefully handle the dissent and channel it towards solutions instead of revolt.

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Foone had a great article about the https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1190784395356950535 device. So I made a joke that today they'd have your allowance on the blockchain, with an Alexa "CleanRoom" Oracle that rewarded you with "ChoreCoin".

Turns out someone beat me to it....

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=tech.sweetcandy.chorecoin&hl=en_US

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Hey fellow commoners. Ostrom in meme form has arrived.

If you start thinking of many of our ecosystems as commons you can also consider using these principles as a diagnostic tool. There's also our own workplace commons too....

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A few days late but Happy Ada Lovelace Day to one and all.

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Wow, multi-day outage for temp badges.

I came in. Said I needed a badge. Wrote my username on a post-it and was given an E badge. I now have to tailgate (!) or ask people to badge me in.

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This is an amazing history of technology in Minnesota. The rise and decline can be traced directly to military expenditures.

It also goes into the fascinating connection between the declining streetcar industry and how those engineers created the first disk drives using electric motors and spinning wheels.

Also tune-in for the coverage of Oregon Trail and of course Internet Gopher....

https://www.tpt.org/solid-state/video/solid-state-minnesotas-high-tech-history-35848/

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An interesting read on the rise of SV and the role that the military-industrial-complex played in that.

Who can deny that today’s commercial Internet has largely fulfilled this cyberpunk nightmare? Someone should ask Gore what he thinks.

https://www.thenation.com/article/silicon-valley-history-book-review/

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2 months notice for the death of Yahoo Groups. Google Group folks take notice, this is not acceptable for preserving the history of the internet.

https://help.yahoo.com/kb/SLN31010.html

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This is a lot of history crammed into an hour. Goes from the early code-breaking work and the development of Drum Memory at Engineering Research Associates.

ERA merged with Sperry/Univac/Remington and then begat Control Data, Cray, Unisys and many others.

Also tune in for some history of the Oregon Trail by Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (MECC) and how that ties into the rise of Internet Gopher.

Oh and disclaimer: former Gopher Dude here.

A few hiccups but finally have something that's stable..

Power Sources:
- Battery: B Class with 36kWh battery and 400W Inverter
- Sun: Solar with up to 1500W
- UPS: 1500W, 900Wh APC

Devices
- Refrigerator ~100-150W while running 250W peak
- Internet: 15W ONT+Router
- Electric Blanket 60W
- LED Lamps ~15W
- Laptop w/85W or 45W charger
- cords, lots of cords

I charge the car battery @1000W during the day with other loads. Using Inverter at night.

The APC UPS was supposed to provide stability, but it kind of sucks:
- slow trickle charge
- Can't charge off the inverter most of the time.
- Has a bad odor.

For now I just use it for the fridge when I have to run errands

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Does our ads matching algorithm do substring matching? Or does YSL have an eau-de-napalm? (As in smells like freedom...)

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Some extreme geometry to start your day...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/120-cell

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"In case you missed it..."

(Seen in discover feed today)

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I hate Myers-Brigg, Colors, all that nonsense. However this framework speaks to my inner Optimizer without going full-on Holocracy.

https://www.alanna.space/fullcircle

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There's an episode of Columbo where the villain uses a photo of a face and a speed camera to establish an alibi.

Columbo enlarges the photos and finds that the shadows are inconsistent. He is able to do this because the photos are ordered by time on a single a roll.

Parallels to blockchains are pretty obvious. Each photo is directly linked to the previous/next photo and there are timestamps involved...

Images from http://columboscreenshots.blogspot.com/2014/03/columbo-58-columbo-and-murder-of-rock.html

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Unintended consequences of Google Image Search.

THE VCE exam body has been left red faced after a doctored artwork depicting a huge robot helping socialist revolutionaries during the Russian Revolution was accidentally included in this year’s year 12 history exam taken by 5700 students.

https://www.theage.com.au/education/history-transformed-in-vce-exam-20121114-29ce7.html

You heard about Young Karl Marx, but have you heard of VI Lenin Evangelion ?

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""All Tech Is Human: San Francisco is an all-day ethical tech summit with 175 technologists, academics, advocates, students, org leaders, artists, designers, policymakers, and YOU. Join us for an impactful mix of lightning talks, topical panels, strategy sessions, tech/humanity art performance, and meeting others in the thoughtful tech movement!"

https://alltechishumansanfrancisco.splashthat.com/

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I joined the http://go/johnhenry team a few weeks ago. Finally getting a chance to post about it after an exciting https://sites.google.com/corp/google.com/societalcontextsummit2019.

Excited to be team building again and really excited about the possibility of bringing systems thinking at scale into Google. Looking forward to how our first partner http://go/delavega uses our Societal Topography and Societal Context Repository to bring ML Fairness to display ads.

So much to learn and many challenges ahead.

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